With the advent of the Internet, email, short messaging, and other modern communications advances, people are receiving and managing more and more electronic messages on a daily basis. For example, new emails are received at an email server and are placed under an in-box folder of a subscriber or user's mailbox, identified by the user's email account. The user can view the incoming emails on the servers using a web-browser, or may download them to a local computer to be viewed using local client email software tools. Every day, people expect to receive different kinds of emails in their mailbox, whether personal, business related, advertisements, news, or even undesirable spam emails. Often, a user may be a customer of online stores or may subscribe to online groups from which promotional or advertising messages are received. Electronic messages from such sources are typically temporally relevant, for example, and may indicate that the promotion or the subscription is valid through a fixed time period. Work-related messages within a business enterprise are often sent as reminders of meetings, deadlines, schedules, etc., and are thus also relevant for only a certain amount of time. Such temporally relevant electronic messages may therefore become stale or irrelevant after a certain amount of time. However, absent management of these messages by the recipient, they remain on the email server even after the promotion or meeting is over. Thus, there is a need for techniques and systems by which electronic messages can be managed to reduce the amount of system resources devoted to messages that are no longer important to the user.